When you enter my house through the basement, there is a freezer. On it is one of those mini dry-erase boards that we got years ago from a failing pizzeria. It was free, but the catch was that their logo was prominently displayed smack-dab in the middle of the thing, making it difficult to read any message one might choose to scribble on it.

This board has been clinging to that freezer for a decade now, and while it permanently haunts us with the memory of the now-extinct pizzeria, a seasonally changing message can always be seen on it. My mother adopted it as her way of updating the status of our immediate family or world around us.

“Welcome home Chrissy!” it would read during my sister’s college’s winter break.

“Merry Christmas 2000!” it said, two thousand years after Jesus was born. Read more